Lydgate temporarily stops visiting the Vincys

Lydgate temporarily stops visiting the Vincys after Mrs. Bulstrode makes clear that his attentions to Rosamond may be interfering with her prospects of marriage. Irritated by the warning and newly alert to how his behavior might appear to others, he decides to visit the family only on business. His withdrawal, intended to prevent further misunderstanding, instead leaves Rosamond in mounting fear that their courtship has ended; a message about Peter Featherstone’s worsening health brings Lydgate back to the house after eleven days and creates an opportunity to resume their earlier ease.

The warning behind the withdrawal

Mrs. Bulstrode first establishes that Lydgate has no intention of marrying soon, then arranges a private conversation with him. She approaches the subject indirectly, speaking of young men who disappoint the families that have invested in them and of the obstacles that can threaten a girl’s prospects. She then makes her point explicit: Rosamond’s attractions and the company she receives draw gentlemen’s attention, while a man’s presence may discourage other offers. Her fixed gaze makes the appeal more than general advice; it is a warning directed at Lydgate.

Lydgate answers that a man would be conceited to assume a young woman might fall in love with him merely because he paid her attention. Mrs. Bulstrode counters that his advantages over the young men of Middlemarch make his visits consequential whether or not he intends them to be. The narrator notes that he is less pleased by this flattering comparison than annoyed by her meaning. Her elevated word “militate,” the narrator observes, gives a noble covering to particulars that remain plain enough. The exchange exposes the gap between Lydgate’s conception of his own conduct as light and uncommitted and the social significance others attach to it.

A resolution sharpened by innuendo

Lydgate’s irritation appears in small gestures: he pushes back his hair, feels in his waistcoat pocket, and stoops to beckon Mrs. Bulstrode’s tiny black spaniel, which refuses his insincere caresses. He cannot simply leave, having dined with the other guests and just taken tea; Mrs. Bulstrode, satisfied that he has understood her, changes the subject. The scene leaves him constrained by company as well as by the warning: he has heard the rebuke but cannot answer it freely in the setting where it is delivered.

The next day, Farebrother assumes they will meet at the Vincys’ that evening. Lydgate curtly says no, explaining that he has work and must give up going out in the evenings. Farebrother jokes about his stopping his ears against sirens. Earlier, Lydgate would have taken this as the vicar’s ordinary manner of speaking; now it sounds like confirmation that he has been behaving foolishly and inviting misinterpretation. He believes Rosamond herself has taken his attentions as lightly as he meant them, but judges the people around her to be blunderers and busybodies. He resolves that the mistake will go no farther and keeps to his decision: he will not visit Mr. Vincy except on business.

Rosamond’s uncertainty

The change is not emotionally neutral for Rosamond. Unease, first stirred by her aunt’s questions, grows during ten days without seeing Lydgate into terror that their association may simply disappear. For six months she has been building hopes around him; now she feels that no other man could prompt the same imaginative anticipation. The narrator compares the change in her world to a wilderness briefly turned into a garden, then returned to desolation. The contrast gives shape to what Lydgate regards as a practical correction: for Rosamond, the absence threatens a whole future she has begun to picture.

Rosamond maintains her appearance and keeps herself proudly calm, but her best explanation is that Mrs. Bulstrode has intervened to stop Lydgate’s visits. That possibility is preferable to believing that he has lost interest of his own accord. The narrator’s account refuses to treat the ten days as trivial simply because they leave no measurable physical mark: in the protected leisure of a young woman’s life, alarmed conjecture and disappointment can run through an intense inner course. Her response also shows how unequal their understanding of the courtship has become. Lydgate thinks she regards his attentions lightly; she has made them the basis of exclusive romantic hopes.

The business call

On the eleventh day, as Lydgate leaves Stone Court, Mrs. Vincy asks him to tell her husband that Peter Featherstone’s health has markedly worsened and that she wants him to come there that day. Lydgate could have delivered the message at the warehouse or written it down and left it at the door. Instead, neither expedient occurs to him, and he calls at the house when Mr. Vincy is absent, leaving the message with Rosamond. The narrator suggests that, although a man may decline to give his company for various reasons, he may still be gratified to discover that his absence has been noticed.

The call is therefore both a genuine errand and an opening through which the old pattern of visits may be pieced back into place. Lydgate has not yet renounced his rule: business provides the stated reason for entering the house. But the circumstances let him speak with Rosamond and make it easy to imagine a return from strict avoidance to familiar playfulness. The interruption makes the action’s significance lie less in a formal reversal than in the tension between the resolution he has kept and the renewed contact his errand permits.

Significance in the courtship

The episode turns on competing interpretations of attention. Mrs. Bulstrode sees Lydgate’s presence as an influence on Rosamond’s prospects; Lydgate resents being treated as though his visits necessarily constituted a promise, while Rosamond experiences their cessation as the possible loss of the relationship she has been imagining. Farebrother’s teasing words acquire force only because Lydgate has already become uneasy about how he appears. As the narrator puts it, “as the sore palate findeth grit, so an uneasy consciousness heareth innuendoes.”

The withdrawal thus does not settle the courtship; it reveals how little the participants share a definition of it. Lydgate’s effort to control public interpretation produces private distress, while a medically motivated return supplies a socially acceptable channel back to the Vincy household. The episode links gossip, reputation, and romantic expectation without making them equivalent: Lydgate fears the first two, whereas Rosamond suffers from the possibility that the third has vanished.